Future Proof Storage Summit

“The Future Proof Storage Summit is about demonstrating SanDisk’s industry leadership to customers and other industry influencers in China,” explains Rafael Feitelberg, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing of Mobile and Connected Solutions. Held in Shenzhen, China, the event brings together key industry leaders and customers in the burgeoning Asian marketplace.

SanDisk executives and our technology partners—among them Rockchip and MediaTek— share their vision of how connected devices such as tablets, smartphones and PCs are expected to evolve in the coming years.

Device-system discussions, executive presentations and roundtable discussions with executives from our ecosystem partners (Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, NVIDIA) are all part of the FPSS event.

As Bob O’Donnell, founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research (and a presenter at the summit) has noted, “One of the most important developments driving the improved performance of our latest devices isn’t the processor inside those devices, but the storage and its interaction with embedded device systems.”

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2013

Future Proof Storage 2015

EPIC – The Future of Mobile Imaging

SanDisk’s annual Future Proof Storage (FPS) brings together industry leaders and luminaries to provide our customers and partners with a clear vision into the future of mobile technology. At FPS 2015 on October 27 in Shenzhen, analysts, photographers, ecosystem partners as well as software developers joined SanDisk and executives from companies such as DxO, LG, Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm to share with 300+ attendees their deep insight into what’s next for smartphones and mobile devices and the storage required to deliver the best user experiences possible.

Smartphones are in the midst another major transformation. The driver this time is imaging capabilities enabled by flash memory!

Panelists and speakers at Future Proof Storage 2015 provided insight the factors that are elevating smartphones from great everyday cameras to the dominant platform in photography and video and what hardware and software makers will have to do to keep up with consumer demand for performance and value. Some highlights of the event:

“One of the most important developments driving the improved performance of our latest devices isn’t the processor inside those devices, but the storage and its interaction with embedded device systems.”

Bob O’Donnell founder and chief analyst, TECHnalysis Research

“This is now becoming an annual milestone for the industry."

Henri Richard SVP, WW Commercial Sales & Support, SanDisk

“72% of traffic will be video” by 2019, noted Dr. Ramchan Woo, vice president and head of smartphone product planning at LG Mobile, who also showed off LG’s latest flagship the V10 which is the first smartphone to meet SanDisk’s ‘Extreme Photo-Imaging Capabilities’ Guidelines.

RAW photography will become part of the mobile experience. Manufacturers and software developers, however, will need to accelerate write-times and develop software applications to make it easy.

Watch the presentation “Working with SanDisk” by Dr. Ramchan Woo.

“If RAW is something they can’t take advantage of until they get back to their computer, it will never take off. It has to be in the phone.”

David Newton
SanDisk Extreme Team
(Clients include Cannon, Conde Nast, the New York Times and Wired.)

Watch the presentation “East Meets West: The Best of Two Worlds” by David Newton and Chun Juan, editor-in-chief of PC Home China in English.

Computational photography will become increasingly important to deliver better zoom, virtual reality and other applications. “Computing is disrupting optics,” said Choon Chng, an engineering manager at Google. “Pixels aren’t perfect (in devices like phones). The optics aren’t perfect but we can compensate with bits.”

All eyes will be on India. Smartphone shipments have climbed 5x in three years, from 22 million in 2012 to 1134 million in 2015, said Neil Shah, research director for devices and ecosystems at Counterpoint Technology Market Research in an exclusive research presentation, and major vendors from around the world are jockeying for market share.

India will also likely be the source of new, exciting global brands as companies will use the domestic market to reach the next five billion customers. “The next two leaders are either from India and Africa,” said S.N. Rai, co-founder of smart phone manufacturer Lava International, which serves India, Bangladesh, Thailand and other countries and is currently expanding factory capacity to produce an additional 80 to 90 million phones.

Hollywood will also contribute to the sophistication of the phone. Many studios are examining strategies for downloading premium content straight to handsets, noted Chris Bergey, vice president and general manager of Mobile & Connected Solutions at SanDisk, and a single 4K Ultra HD movie distributed from a studio, one predicted, could take up to 80GB.

Watch the presentation “Mobile Economy is Shifting and so is Mobile Storage” by Chris Bergey in English.

How big is digital? Approximately 1 trillion images will be created this year, said to Josh Haftel, who manages mobile photography solutions at Adobe: that comes to over 31,000 new images per second. And the vast majority are shot on smart phones.

Watch the presentation “How Mobile Has Changed Photography for the Better” by Josh Haftel in English.

Meanwhile, Ziv Paz, director of strategic business development at SanDisk, gave an overview of the growing opportunities for the Internet of Things and highlighted one of the most important issues manufacturers and service providers will face: how do you balance the need for data with bandwidth costs. Expect to see many resort to local caching.

The cloud isn’t everything. “Ease of use and speed of access will become important to cope with large file sizes,” said Gavin Wu, APAC retail sales and marketing at SanDisk.

Watch the presentation “Retail Mobile flash Memory Solutions” by Gavin Wu in English

Nicolas Touchard, vice president of marketing and product management at DxO, also gave attendees an overview of DxOMark Mobile, the company’s innovative suite of benchmarks for rating video and picture quality on smartphones. If you’re not familiar with the benchmark, you need to start doing your homework. DxoMark gets approximately 750,000 to 1 million unique visitors a month and grew by 25% last year. Multiple reviewer sites use its tests for product reviews. “If your memory is not fast enough, you’re not going to be able to able to capture slow motion,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ziv Paz, director of strategic business development at SanDisk, gave an overview of the growing opportunities for the Internet of Things and highlighted one of the most important issues manufacturers and service providers will face: how do you balance the need for data with bandwidth costs. Expect to see many resort to local caching.

This year’s event brought together executives from more than 90 Asia-based mobile, tablet and consumer electronics companies and manufacturers, including Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo and ZTE.

Leading companies in the mobile ecosystem, including Allwinner, HiSilicon, Intel, MediTrek, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and RockChip, also sent their senior representatives, emphasizing their close relationship and tight technical integration with SanDisk.

Six presentations and two panel discussions examined new technologies, applications, flash storage advancements and market trends that are shaping the mobile and connected world today and the future.

“By working closely to integrate new SanDisk X3 storage solutions with the products from our ecosystem partners, we’re enabling manufacturers to offer smartphones, tablets and other innovative devices for the mass market—providing users the capacity and application performance they demand,” Henry told attendees in his keynote talk: Designing for the Next Generation of Storage, Smartphones, Tablets and New Devices.

The conference also included presentations by other industry thought leaders, including Bob O’Donnell, Founder and Chief Analyst of TECHnalysis Research. In his Future of Mobility presentation, O’Donnell said, “Device storage will become increasingly more critical for managing a portable digital identity—including our data, passwords and preferences—that works across devices and services.”

SanDisk showcased the latest in storage technologies with two live demos: one that highlighted iNAND® 3120’s X3 performance vs an X2-based option, and a second that framed the exceptional user experience and performance advantages of iNAND® 7030.

“This year’s attendance increased by more than 100 compared to our 2013 event,” says Rafael Feitelberg, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing of Mobile and Connected Solutions at SanDisk. “Our post-conference survey indicated more than 90% are interested to come back next year, with more than 85% of attendees wanting to learn more about SanDisk’s products and technologies.”

We held our annual seminar, Future Proof Storage, on August 28, 2013 in Shenzhen, China. The seminar featured valuable insights from industry leaders such as Broadcom, Intel, Konka, Laoyaoba, Marvell, Meitu, Qualcomm, and Rockchip. Discussions and sessions centered on how intelligent storage solutions can help with the development of current and future-facing products and deliver superb customer experiences.

Over 200 attendees gathered at the event to learn, to connect and find out the latest regarding future growth engines, upcoming technologies, standards and new applications.